SDOAR Update

Carson Grubaugh:

A couple of updates on SDOAR.

I finally got a printer/scanner that can handle the process outlined in my last post. That, plus having settled into my classes for the semester, allowed me to finally ink what will be page 1. Here it is scanned in grey-scale, before any adjustments.

A detail.

I didn't like how I used white-out to make the snow last time. It was hard to go back and draw over any pieces of snow with poor size, shape or placement of. I realized it would be easier to just plop the snow in using Photoshop

So, after some contrast adjustment I did the snow. Anything that bugs me or Dave on this version is now really easy to fix.

After seeing what Sean does with the the Archive restoration I feel pretty ashamed of my own adjustment skills. Hopefully he will be contributing his mastery to SODAR whenever it goes to print!

With the first four pages now done we run into a pretty big problem. The shop I photographed, Local Heroes (I was happy to see a big stack of Glamourpuss on the far-right, second row from the top, in the first image that pops up on their site!), and the shop-manager who modeled for me, Jack VanDyke, are in Norfolk, VA, where I spent the last school-year as a visiting professor of painting for Old Dominion University. When my contract ended in July I moved back home to Modesto, California. You can see the problem.

Jack said she could get someone to take the pictures I need so I prepared the following layouts for her to use as reference. The idea was to provide a structure to guide the shoot. I had the idea that the 'story' could be crafted almost entirely out of poses already in Dave's pages. This adds another layer of plagiarism and metaphysical life-imitating-art-imitating-

life-etc., which are central to SDOAR. It also seemed prudent to have a plot device that got rid of any need for Jack and Local Heroes in future volumes. Given how powerful the synchronicities seem to get around Dave I also wanted to make sure that we gave Jack, and honestly, myself, a backdoor out of any potential consequences of messing about with the Margaret Mitchell Glamour.

When I added notes and instructions the whole thing became its own weird mini-comic.

These layouts also provide a sneak-peek at some of Dave's art in SDOAR. Hope he doesn't mind. Eeek! I don't know how much of this Dave will use, or if he is going to mock up entirely different pages using the photos I take, but I felt like I had to have a narrative structure to work within for the photo-shoot to be successful, especially without me there.

A month or more went by after I sent these to Jack and I had not heard anything back. When I did speak with her I got the impression that the amount of photos needed was overwhelming her so I proposed to Dave the idea of flying me back out to Norfolk for a weekend to get the rest of the pictures. Dave, being the generous man that he was totally willing to pay for the flight, which is booked for November 2nd - 6th. When I get home from that I will update you all on how the trip went, share plenty of photos from the shoot and then get right to work on the pages. How fast I work from there will depend on what my teaching assignments look like for the Spring 2017 semester.